Writer frustrated with Urbanspoon’s iPhone app

New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni details his frustrating experience trying to find restaurants in New York using Urbanspoon’s new restaurant locator application for the iPhone.

He writes that the Urbanspoon restaurant guide — along with those from Yelp and Citysearch — can “be frustratingly outdated, incomplete and subjective.”

I mentioned yesterday Urbanspoon’s success with its novel iPhone application, which allows users to shake the device in order to find a nearby restaurant. As of yesterday more than 65,000 people had downloaded the free application.

But Bruni said Urbanspoon often directed him to restaurants that were several blocks away, rather than the obvious choices nearby.

“Without refinement, searches tend to spit out a curious hodgepodge, as my friend, Gary, and I discovered at the beginning of our experiment, in his apartment just south of Union Square,” he writes.

He later notes that the service works “admirably at times,” but the review is far from glowing. But Urbanspoon, which allows users to rate and review restaurants, should know a thing or two about bad reviews.

Asked about the review, Urbanspoon founder Ethan Lowry says he is “pretty happy that (Bruni) spent half his weekend playing around with Urbanspoon.”